Primeur magazine

Edition: weekly - Issue:
2017-05-29

Focus

During the e-IRG Workshop in Bratislava, Slovak Republic,Primeur Magazinehad the chance to talk to Peter Wittenburg, Executive Director of the Research Data Alliance Europe and Senior Data Systems Advisor at the Max Planck Compute and Data Facility. Peter Wittenburg studied Computer Science and Pattern Recognition in Berlin. He had the opportunity to build the Technology and Methodology Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he stayed for 40 years. During that period, he got involved in various research infrastructure groups, first of all within the Max-Planck-Society, bringing together people from different institutes working at similar issues.
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At the occasion of the Super D SURFsara event,Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to talk with Siewert-Jan Marrink, Professor of Molecular Dynamics at the University of Groningen. The work Professor Marrink does in the Molecular Dynamics Group is to use big computers to simulate the interaction of molecules, and in particular, the molecules that build cell membranes. He and his colleagues are interested in understanding how cellular membranes are organised, how the lipids and the proteins that make up these membranes are self-organised. This is a very complex matter because cell membranes are composed of hundreds of different lipid type of molecules crowded with proteins. They together make or give rise to the different processes that govern the functioning of cells.
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Quantum computing

Quantum computers are experimental devices that offer large speed-ups on some computational problems. One promising approach to building them involves harnessing nanometer-scale atomic defects in diamond materials.
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Focus on Europe

The ISC Group, the organizer of ISC High Performance, has appointed Prof. Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, as the programme chairman for ISC 2018. This new appointment not only enriches the international nature of ISC, it also brings a unique perspective to the yearly conference. The 2018 conference will once again be held at Forum Messe Frankfurt, from June 24 to June 28, 2018.
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OMREN, the Oman National Research and Education Network (NREN), is now connected to the NetherLight open light path exchange in Amsterdam from the country's capital city, Muscat. The direct 1 Gbit/s link provides OMREN with new opportunities for international collaboration.
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Middleware

The OpenMP ARB, a group of hardware and software vendors and research organisations which creates the OpenMP standard parallel programming specification, has appointed Duncan Poole and Kathryn O'Brien to its Board of Directors. They bring a wealth of experience to the OpenMP ARB.
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Hardware

For over a decade the University of Bristol has been contributing to world-leading and life changing scientific research using High Performance Computing (HPC), having invested over GBP 16 million in HPC and research data storage. To continue meeting the needs of its researchers working with complex and large amounts of data, they will now benefit from a new HPC machine, named BlueCrystal 4 (BC4). Designed, integrated and configured by the HPC, storage and data analytics integrator OCF, BC4 has more than 15,000 cores making it the largest UK University system by core count and a theoretical peak performance of 600 Teraflops.
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Large commercial machine learning programmes in manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, medical research and natural-language processing are overcoming production scaling challenges with DataDirect Networks' (DDN) large-scale, high-performance storage solutions. Machine learning projects often stumble in the transition from proof of concept to production scale, which can introduce significant production delays in rapidly developing markets where time is of the essence.
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DataDirect Networks (DDN) has appointed Eric Barton as the company's chief technology officer (CTO) for software-defined storage. In this role, Eric Barton will lead the company's strategic roadmap, technology architecture and product design for DDN's newly created Infinite Memory Engine (IME) business unit. Eric Barton brings with him more than 30 years of technology innovation, entrepreneurship and expertise in networking, distributed systems and storage software.
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Inspired by how mammals see, a new 'memristor' computer circuit prototype at the University of Michigan has the potential to process complex data, such as images and video orders of magnitude, faster and with much less power than today's most advanced systems.
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The new supercomputer of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) not only is very fast, but also very economical. The high-performance computer ForHLR II that started operation last year has now reached the first place in the German Computing Center Prize category of 'Newly built energy- and resource-efficient computing centers'. It has more than 24,000 processor cores and is equipped with a highly energy-efficient cooling system. The costs of the computer amounted to 26 million euro.
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When education and research institutions place their ICT on a shared e-Infrastructure this generates a considerable amount of energy savings, estimated at tens of percentages. SURF has inventorised the effects of a transition and makes some important recommendations in the Sustainable e-Infrastructure report.
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Applications

IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created the new Center for Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning, and Semantics (HEALS). Located on the Rensselaer campus, the HEALS centre is a five-year collaborative research effort aimed at researching how the application of advanced cognitive computing capabilities can help people to understand and improve their own health conditions.
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Researchers have used a supercomputer to show how proteins in the brain control electrical signals, in a breakthrough that could lead to safer and more effective drugs and anaesthetics.
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Achieving magnetic order in low-dimensional systems consisting of only one or two dimensions has been a research goal for some time. In a new study published in the journalNature Communications, Uppsala researchers show that magnetic order can be created in a two-dimensional chessboard lattice consisting of organometallic molecules that are only one atomic layer thick.
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Two-dimensional magnetic structures are regarded as a promising material for new types of data storage, since the magnetic properties of individual molecular building blocks can be investigated and modified. For the first time, researchers have now produced a wafer-thin ferrimagnet, in which molecules with different magnetic centres arrange themselves on a gold surface to form a checkerboard pattern. Scientists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel and the Paul Scherrer Institute published their findings in the journalNature Communications.
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Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a technology platform with which they can create 3D city models using image data alone. The platform, known as "VarCity", is so versatile that it can use, evaluate, and automatically combine all possible kinds of image sources: aerial photographs, 360-degree panoramic images taken with special vehicles, and even standard photos such as those published by tourists on social networks and internet platforms. The platform also uses video material, such as from public webcams.
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Contrary to posters you may have seen hanging on the walls in science buildings and classrooms, Lijun Liu, professor of geology at Illinois, knows that Earth's interior is not like an onion.
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When a group of researchers in the Undiagnosed Disease Network at Baylor College of Medicine realized they were spending days combing through databases searching for information regarding gene variants, they decided to do something about it. By creating MARRVEL - Model organism Aggregated Resources for Rare Variant ExpLoration - they are now able to help not only their own lab but also researchers everywhere search databases all at once and in a matter of minutes.
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The emerging discipline of space meteorology aims to reliably predict solar flares so that we may better guard against their effects. Using 3D numerical models, an international team headed by Etienne Pariat, a researcher at LESIA, Observatoire de Paris / CNRS / Université Paris Diderot / UPMC), has discovered a proxy that could be used to forecast an eruptive event. The proxy is associated with magnetic helicity, which reflects the extent of twist and entanglement of the magnetic field. The study is published in the journalAstronomy and Astrophysicsdated 17 May 2017.
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The Cloud

AS ONE Corporation has released APIs using Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service, which provides Oracle's latest database, Oracle Database 12c Release 2, in the Cloud. With these offerings, AS ONE will be able to provide its 4,300 dealerships with real-time information for over 300,000 inventory datasets. Prior to the investment in Oracle's solutions, the data could only be published once a day.
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Red Hat Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Codenvy, provider of Cloud-native development tools that enable developers to more easily create modern container-based and Cloud-native applications. By adding Codenvy to its existing portfolio of developer tools and application platforms, including Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat continues its efforts to provide solutions that enable developers to create applications for hybrid Cloud environments. Red Hat plans to make Codenvy an integral part of OpenShift.io, Red Hat's recently announced hosted development environment for building hybrid Cloud services on OpenShift.
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